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<title>Susan's Eulogy by myaekingheart</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23323816">Susan's Eulogy</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/myaekingheart/pseuds/myaekingheart'>myaekingheart</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2016-11-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2016-11-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 16:15:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>780</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23323816</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/myaekingheart/pseuds/myaekingheart</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever said goodbyes were easy. (Written in 2016)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Susan's Eulogy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>                Susan twiddled her thumbs as a haze of afternoon sun cast an array of colored light across her face. Her lips were dark red and imprinted by the sharp bite of her teeth. She locked her blurring eyes on the pastor, the cross, the bouquets garlanding memorials for lives lost. An ancient hymn droned from the organ before slowly halting and with one expression, Susan rose and approached the podium. Her shaky hands unfolded a slip of paper from her breast pocket and she presently began to read.<br/>
                "When I was a child, my family was greatly affected by the war. My father served in the military and the air raids became unbearable, we were torn from our mother and sent away. For the longest while, my siblings-- Peter, Edmund, and Lucy-- were all I had" she began, voice quiet and hoarse. "We would play this game. We'd pretend we could disappear into this magical land in the back of the upstairs wardrobe. It was silly and childish but there was something about those games that brought us closer together, that forced us to face unspeakable things we otherwise would have simply just buried deep within ourselves and tried to forget." An anger then began to bubble up within her, the kind that leads you to hysterics. Being a woman of poise and dignity, however, she forced herself to retain composure. "Slowly, they became consumed by this delusion that there was someplace else, some other dimension which they swore we've always known. A world where animals were noble soldiers and the trees had their own language. A world where a bloody lion was the messiah! And as they became engulfed, we were driven further and further apart until my brothers and sister, these people I had once been so close with, became like strangers to me. They were quite unlike the Peter, Edmund, and Lucy I had grown with. They were otherworldly, ethereal. They seemed to adopt this strange quality about themselves where they lived as if they were in their imaginations, as if they were always looed after by this illusion, this lion. And as I stand here before you all today and speak of these horrible memories, I, too, feel almost as though I once knew this lion, as well."<br/>
                Susan paused and glanced at all the faces staring back at her, expressionless canvases and hollow eyes. Her anger transformed into insanity as she pressed a hand to her forehead and chewed over what she had just said. "But that's absolutely ridiculous" she laughed, "because I didn't know him. Not really. He never existed in the first place. None of it did." Suddenly she was seized by brief flashes of forests and rivers and castles, of mythical creatures alive only in storybooks. They stole the breath from her lungs and for a moment, she completely forgot she was standing in a chapel before a crowd of mourners. As her episode finished and she was reminded of where she was, she immediately sucked in a deep breath, straightened her back, and continued.<br/>
                "Yet...yet that denial divided us more than anything else in my lifetime" she choked out. "To think that one such thing, a silly belief, could tear a family apart...my mind is truly boggled by it. Despite all of this senseless bickering, however, I have nothing poor to say of my family." Glassy eyes glanced to the memorials laid out for each of them and a small whimper escaped her throat. Without returning her gaze to the audience, she explained, "My mother was always kind, my father always strong. Peter grew to be a magnificent leader. Edmund was just and bright. Lucy's valiance shined with all the stars in the solar system. They were as perfect as they could have possibly been and perhaps that's why they were taken so soon. They could never improve ay further than they already had. They were done growing in spirit if not even in body."<br/>
                By now, there was no trafficking the onslaught of tears pouring down Susan's face. She crumpled her notes in her hand and grasped the podium to steady herself, the entire chapel blurring like a chalk painting in a thunderstorm. "I don't know for sure whether heaven existsbut as I stand before you all today, I can surely say that if it does, my mother and father and all my siblings have certainly found it" she spoke. "And if the real heaven is as phenomenal as all the storybooks say, then, well, I can rightly imagine it's as beautiful a place as that magical land we dreamed of in the back of an upstairs wardrobe."</p>
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